British Lawmakers Think Rupert Murdoch Has Some 'Splaining To Do About Those Bribes To Officials

Those recently released secret recordings of Rupert Murdoch at a meeting with his employees are proving more than an embarrassment. Murdoch's supposedly private comments about the scandal plaguing his companies are so contradictory to the evidence he provided to a parliamentary inquiry that British lawmakers are asking him to come back and explain himself.

As I previously wrote, when Murdoch appeared before the parliamentary committee, he claimed to be appalled and contrite and his lieutenant son, James Murdoch, claimed to be hugely regretful over the company’s actions – that he blamed subordinates for hiding from him.

But as The Guardian reported today, the recordings contradict that picture:

On one clip published by investigative journalism website Exaro News and broadcast by Channel 4 an unidentified Sun journalist asks Murdoch: "I'm pretty confident that the working practices that I've seen here are ones that I've inherited, rather than instigated. Would you recognise that all this predates many of our involvement here?"

Murdoch replies: "We're talking about payments for news tips from cops. That's been going on a hundred years, absolutely."

Earlier in the tape, Murdoch tells the Sun journalists: "I don't know of anybody, or anything, that did anything that wasn't being done across Fleet Street and wasn't the culture."

In his column on the subject, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert writes that Murdoch's efforts to put the scandal behind him have boomeranged:

Now the Murdoch 'comeback' has been tainted by the revelation that the CEO apparently believed nothing he was saying publicly in the wake of the shocking behavior of his tabloid employees. Instead, Murdoch expected the rampant lawbreaking taking place at his properties, and he didn't think there was anything wrong with it.

And that's the reason it's hard for Murdoch to lose that stench of scandal even two years later. It's because a well-established culture of corruption permeates his media empire, to the point where some portions were run like a criminal enterprise.